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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/27762367">As the World Falls Down</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/superblackmarket/pseuds/superblackmarket'>superblackmarket</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The Old Guard (Movie 2020)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>M/M, booker-typical attitudes, geopolitics and jealousy and lots of bad decisions, kabul 1998</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-11-28</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-11-28</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-18 07:52:56</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>5,200</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/27762367</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/superblackmarket/pseuds/superblackmarket</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <em>“Pull it together, Book,” Nicky said sternly. “Be a little brave.”</em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>“Brave?” He glowered at them. “For Christ’s sake, I’m not like the two of you and I’m not like Andy. I’m not brave and I never have been, and d’you know what? I’ve no wish to be! None. Never fucking have, either. So just…fuck it, okay? You’re not my keepers. Let me go.”</em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>“No,” Nicky said, simply, and Booker wanted to throttle him.</em>
</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Booker | Sebastien le Livre &amp; Joe | Yusuf al-Kaysani &amp; Nicky | Nicolò di Genova, Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>96</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>352</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>As the World Falls Down</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Booker lost the path in Afghanistan, during the summer of ’98. He’d been unsettled for months, certain the bad times were coming, and, well… lo and behold: the bad times came for him. He was alone in Kabul, an unofficial liaison with the British government, while Joe and Nicky were up north mobilizing the opposition; Andy was in Peshawar. Booker received their coded dispatches and passed the information along to the right people. Otherwise, he didn’t have much to do. The Taliban were making life pretty fucking miserable for everybody, so it wasn’t like he could go out and distract himself in any of the usual ways. There were no bars. Even <em>drinking </em>was a crime here, a crime for which one could find oneself Toyota-trucked out to the former football stadium and have one’s fucking <em>hand </em>cut off.</p>
<p>Very rough lot, these Taliban—most of them had grown up in refugee camps. Joe said they had a reading of Islam unlike any other in the world.</p>
<p>Apparently Afghanistan had been a functioning country as recently as twenty years ago, with cinemas and roads and standing buildings and secretaries in knee-length skirts. Now it was hardly a country at all. Just a populated disaster. Decimated infrastructure. Never-ending war. No tourism. Who the fuck would want to travel here? Joe and Nicky, of course. Up in Taloqan, doing heroic things with Ahmad Shah Massoud and the Northern Alliance, while Booker sat around collecting dust in Kabul.</p>
<p>Well, not quite.</p>
<p>Kabul in fact boasted a thriving underground scene, and it didn’t take him long to fall into some dissolute company—aid workers, journalists, diplomats, military contractors, all of them on the brink. One night a group of them were watching a pirated copy of <em>Titanic </em>in somebody’s hotel room, and a doctor from Médecins Sans Frontières asked him if he fancied sharing a bowl. He said yes. He’d been around for the heyday of the stuff—Coleridge, DeQuincy, Keats, Southey, Shelley, Byron—and again for the Victorian years. It came with a pedigree, a whole glorious lineage, and now Afghanistan was the number-one supplier of the world. What was the harm? It couldn’t kill him, at least not permanently. Bitter milk of the poppy plant. It relaxed him, gave him immense dreams. It felt like having an orgasm deep inside his head.</p>
<p>He was fucking flying. Star of his own movie, magic carpet over minarets in the moonlight. Lovely.</p>
<p>Opium stanched sentiment, thank god, or else the situation might have really gotten to him. The <em>geopolitics. </em>Taliban, mujahideen. This way Sunni Pakistan, that way Shi’ite Iran, down there Sunni Saudi Arabia and their overlord the sunny United States, which had smiled down on the Taliban before it reversed course and bombed them. Booker noticed that every other Afghan man was missing pieces. And there were no women at all; they were kept out of sight.</p>
<p>More flying. He began to see the sky as a kind of membrane; his head felt like it was the size of the planet. The sky was just a casing for his pulsing brain and it was too thin. He might explode like a star. Bad times, bad times. He tried to remember the last good time. Morocco, maybe? After the Bosnian War, the four of them had taken a vacation together, spent a few months in Tangier.</p>
<p>Yes, Tangier had been nice. The light was brilliant, the air pure and clear. He could hear the muezzin call above the medina and watch the great birds hovering on the white seafront at evening. Smoke endless cigarettes—the Moroccans were unequivocally the greatest smokers on earth—and drink bottles of Mahou beer. Wander through the streets as narrow as bones, streets like a labyrinth. Oftentimes he and Andy stayed out all night. When they strolled back to the hotel in early morning they would find Nicky sitting on the terrace with a book and the three of them would have coffee and pastries; Joe would appear once the sun was a bit higher in the sky. Andy smiled a lot in Tangier. Joe and Nicky called Booker brother, and some days Booker allowed himself to believe them. </p>
<p>Joe had discovered a dingy little Maroc gym, and several times a week the two of them would strap on their gloves and go a few rounds in the ring. He and Joe both enjoyed boxing, the brute strength of it. Andy and Nicky did not, they were speed fighters who took little pleasure in pounding an opponent to a pulp when a single strike or jab or well-placed kick might do the job. But <em>brawler</em> was the only fighting style that Booker might reasonably claim as his own, and Joe was willing to set aside the finer points of his many martial arts to go slug for slug with him. It was great fun, and when they were done they’d go to a bar and watch football. Booker relished those rare leisure times when Joe and Nicky <em>didn’t </em>come as a matched set, and he got one of them all to himself. Afternoons with Joe at the boxing gym. Wandering around the Musée de la Kasbah with Nicky. He basked in the radiance of their full attention.</p>
<p>But discontent had crept back in when Joe and Nicky started talking seriously about Afghanistan. They were so impassioned in their certainty, their righteousness, and their love, holding hands under the table as they made their case at breakfast one morning. Their argument came in slow drifts at first, with Joe quoting some poetry, <em>Oh the beautiful city of Kabul wears a rugged mountain skirt, / And the rose is jealous of its lash-like thorns, </em>then in quicker attacks, Nicky jabbering away in rapid Italian<em>, one in six newborn babies dies in Afghanistan, about half the remaining children die before they reach the age of five.</em> Joe coming in with the statistics, <em>on the Human Index Rank, Afghanistan is 169th of 174 countries</em>. Andy frowning thoughtfully, drumming her fingers against the tabletop. Then Nicky talking about children again, <em>thirty-five percent of those who survive are drastically malnourished</em>, and women, too, <em>the only reason it’s not considered </em>the <em>worst for women is because the Afghans don’t do genital mutilation. Most of the arable land is land-mined</em>—… and so on and so forth.</p>
<p>Booker thought the place sounded like a fucking disease.</p>
<p>But he was outvoted.</p>
<p>“Kabul was founded by Cain and Abel, you know,” Joe remarked. “According to legend, Cain is buried there.”</p>
<p>They packed up and flew to London, to get ready for Afghanistan. Joe grew out his beard and Nicky took out his earrings; the two of them spoke to each other in Farsi—or Dari, as it was called over there—to get the language back in their mouths. They practiced basic phrases in Pashto. Booker perfected an upper-crust British accent: he was going to be Our Man in Kabul. Andy, who had no intention of subjecting herself to sharia hudud and being shrouded in a burqa, decided she would run their operation from Peshawar.</p>
<p>In Kabul, his existence shrank to three points of contact: the U.N. compound, the Red Crescent offices, and the hotel lounge. Out in the streets, he was always being stopped by the Nai Azz Munkar, the Taliban religious police, who—with some justification—took one look at him and accused him of public intoxication. Or they thought he was American. They brandished their rubber hoses and ratcheted their Kalashnikovs; several times he had to drag a limp body into an alley behind a bombed-out building and slink away, peering nervously over his shoulder.</p>
<p>He was haunted by thoughts of Joe and Nicky, as they had been in Tangier, in London. They loved each other, and they loved the world. They were a strange country together. He couldn’t understand it. If he were Joe, he would have taken Nicky away and seceded from the rest of the world, become an island kingdom. But Joe and Nicky were a maritime republic, borders at once porous and defined, with trade and seaports and a thriving metropolis. They loved the world.</p>
<p>He’d open a door, turn a corner, and glimpse them making love against the wall.</p>
<p>Flying still, less lovely now. He started dreaming of Quynh again, the iron coffin. The hours became heavy and cumbersome; they moved like old horses. The opium wasn’t wiping his brain as well as it used to do. Now he felt pinned to the earth, his skin stretched out in a thousand sharp pulls: Andromache, in Peshawar to the east; Joe and Nicky, in Taloqan to the north; Quynh, at the bottom of the sea; his dead wife, his dead children; the arbitrary stupidity of European cartographers; all the people he’d killed; his sleepless nights, his addictions, his jealousies; his many victims, his unnamable fears and the hammering of his heart in the dark and all the danger that moved through the night and all of his ghosts and all that his ghosts demanded of him and the places that he had been to in his life and longed for again; the solitude that he so badly craved, and the peace he so needed, and the love he needed, and he was just a young man still—relative to the other three, anyway—but he was pinned to the fucking earth and oh how desperately he wanted to go.</p>
<p>Then one day he woke up—he couldn’t have said what time it was, whether it was morning or evening—and Nicky was sitting at the foot of his bed, looking at him.</p>
<p>“Hello, Booker,” he said. He wore a grey kameez over military fatigues and his eyes were like chips of jade.</p>
<p>Probably a hallucination, Booker thought. “What’re you doing here?” he asked, slurring his words. “Thought you were up in, uh, whatchamacallit, the…”</p>
<p>“How long have you been like this?” Nicky said. </p>
<p>“Huh?”</p>
<p>Nicky flicked his eyes at the drug paraphernalia strewn across the table.</p>
<p>“Dunno.” He dug his fists into his eye sockets, hoping the hallucination would go away once he’d woken up a little. But when he lowered his hands, Nicky was still sitting there, elbows resting on his knees, fingers steepled under his chin. Lean and angular as a wolf, Booker thought, and every bit as dangerous.</p>
<p>“I am sure I don’t have to remind you,” Nicky began, voice ominously soft, “of the importance of the information with which you have been entrusted—”</p>
<p>“Oh, fuck off, will you?” he groaned; his conscience was really doing a number on him, taking this form. The unsettling jade-colored eyes. The Tajik-style dress—the fringed scarf, the beret-like pakul. The Kalashnikov propped against the wall. Jesus Christ. He needed coffee, he needed something to eat, and he needed Nicky to get out of his head. Then maybe he’d stand a chance. “’M fine. Everything’s… fine.”</p>
<p>The Nicky-hallucination heaved a long-suffering sigh. “Sebastien—”</p>
<p>“No. Go away. You’re not… real.”</p>
<p>“Oh, you’ll <em>wish </em>I’m not real,” not-Nicky said, with grim humor, “as soon as you’re sober.”</p>
<p>Booker didn’t like the sound of that. “Where’s Joe?”</p>
<p>“He’s on his way.”</p>
<p>“You’re both here?”</p>
<p>“Yes.”</p>
<p>“In Kabul?”</p>
<p>“<em>Yes</em>, Booker.”</p>
<p>The bed shifted slightly as Nicky handed him a bottle of water; at the brush of their fingers, Booker felt a crushing wave of defeat. Real, then. All too real. Nicky was really here, and so was Joe, and now he would have to answer for himself, how far astray he’d drifted, all the opium he’d smoked, and he was starting to think the stuff didn’t agree with him anymore. His head throbbed. “I never wanted to come here.”</p>
<p>“It’s seldom a question of <em>want</em>, in our line of work.” </p>
<p>“Fucking hell, Nicky.”</p>
<p>“We have responsibilities.”</p>
<p>“No, we <em>don’t</em>.” He uncapped the water bottle with shaking fingers and took a swig. “There’s no ‘responsibilities,’ and there’s no ‘line of work.’ You and Joe and Andy just up and decided, a long time ago, that you were some kind of, oh, I dunno, non-governmental interventionist task force, and now we run around inserting ourselves into other people’s problems, like we know better, which we don’t—. I’m almost starting to think they’re what Afghanistan needs, the Taliban.”</p>
<p>“Nobody needs fascism, Booker.”</p>
<p>“Well, it’s that or civil war.”</p>
<p>“There are thirty thousand widows in this city,” Nicky said, “with three hundred thousand children to feed, but they are not permitted to work. Are the Taliban what <em>they </em>need? And what about the—”</p>
<p>“Why do you care so much?” Booker demanded. “This place is a fucking shithole, full of fucking shitty people. They’re ruthless fanatical <em>evil </em>bastards, all of them, they aren’t like Joe—”</p>
<p>“Like <em>Joe</em>?” Nicky’s eyes turned steely. “What is <em>that</em> supposed to mean?”</p>
<p>Nicky would probably kill him for saying it; in fact Booker was counting on it, that Nicky would stab him or strangle him or blow a hole through his chest with the Kalashnikov. “Someone who’s given up the worst of his religion to become, you know, a nice Western sort of Muslim?”</p>
<p>But Nicky, damn him—he only sighed. “Sebastien, stop trying so hard to be parochial. It doesn’t suit you.”</p>
<p>“I’m serious,” he said feebly.</p>
<p>“No, you’re not,” Nicky told him. “All this—” he gestured, and the gesture somehow managed to encompass the room, the city, the whole blasted country— “We reap what we sow. Most conflicts in the world today have their origins in the imaginations of European surveyors. This has little to do with Islam, and everything to do with Russia, Britain, America, the Great Game…” Nicky smiled thinly. “I know you know all of this, Booker. You cannot so easily provoke me into killing you.”</p>
<p>Well, it had been worth a shot. “If you killed me, at least I’d wake up without this headache,” he grumbled.</p>
<p>“You deserve it. Honestly, Sebastien, <em>opium</em>? What do you think this is, 1819?”</p>
<p>“Would you rather I did heroin?”</p>
<p>Nicky sighed again. “Pack your bag. It’s time to go.”</p>
<p>Booker tried not to look too relieved. “We’re leaving?”</p>
<p>“You aren’t well,” Nicky said shortly. “We have to get you out of here.”</p>
<p>“Where are we—”</p>
<p>“London. We don’t have much time. Joe is arranging the plane now. He’s—”</p>
<p>But before Nicky could finish, the door banged open, and suddenly the room was filled with Joe.</p>
<p>“Ah, there’s the reprobate!” he exclaimed, and to Booker’s utter amazement, he pulled him into a bone-crushing hug and kissed him on both cheeks. “I’m glad to see you, brother.”</p>
<p>“…You are?” he asked, wheezing a little.</p>
<p>“Sure.” Joe released him. Like Nicky, he was deeply tanned and wore an eclectic combination of military fatigues and ethnic dress, with a pakul perched rakishly over his curls. “And so is Nicolò.”</p>
<p>Booker said he rather doubted that.</p>
<p>Joe glanced between them and grinned. “Chilly reception?”</p>
<p>“Pretty frosty, yeah,” Booker said; Nicky pursed his lips and said nothing.</p>
<p>Joe smacked him on the shoulder. “Even though you tanked the job, you shithead, we are <em>both</em> very glad to see you.”</p>
<p>Then Joe straightened up and took Nicky into his arms, and Booker looked on with a different kind of amazement as the two of them kissed like they’d just invented it: locked together in a passionate embrace, necks twisted to extreme angles as they devoured each other ravenously. Booker could hear their mouths moving wetly, their breathless little gasps. Nicky had knocked Joe’s hat off to bury his hands in his hair, and Joe’s fingers were knotted in the fabric of Nicky’s kameez. Then Nicky began to walk Joe backward, pressing him against the wall, and Booker cleared his throat.</p>
<p>“Jesus Christ, guys. How long were you apart—three hours?”</p>
<p>Nicky broke the kiss, sagging against Joe and hiding his face in his shoulder; it was Joe who finally answered. “It’s been months since we’ve been able to touch each other,” he said hoarsely, running his fingers through Nicky’s hair. “Too much risk. Massoud, he’s open-minded about some things—”</p>
<p>“Better for women,” Nicky said. He turned his head and caught Booker’s eye, a self-deprecating little smile playing about his lips. “And not so god-crazy.”</p>
<p>“But other things, things like <em>us</em>—” Joe shook his head. “We’d have been castrated and stoned.”</p>
<p>“Right, yeah.” Booker rubbed his temples. It hadn’t occurred to him, the personal sacrifice Joe and Nicky were making when they committed themselves to the staunchly traditional ranks of the mujahideen. Or any cause, really, now that he thought about it. That was the price Joe and Nicky paid for having what they did, for having each other. They always had to give up more. “I dunno what to say, guys.”</p>
<p>“You could start with an apology,” Joe suggested.</p>
<p>Stubborn, he folded his arms. “My cover would’ve been up soon anyway,” he pointed out. “The British, the U.N., the NGOs—they’re all on the verge of pulling out. Massoud’s on his own against the Taliban. The West is <em>done</em> with Afghanistan. Taliban fatigue. Or disgust, rather. Ban-ban Taliban.”</p>
<p>Joe and Nicky regarded him with twin expressions of reproach.</p>
<p>“Alright, <em>fine.</em>” He exhaled noisily. “I’m sorry I fucked this up. The opium was an accident.”</p>
<p>“We understand, you know,” Joe said. “It happens to all of us.”</p>
<p>“Does it?” he said, skeptically.  </p>
<p>“We put our hearts into what we do. Every so often, there’s gonna be a job or a place that just—breaks you. Breaks your heart.”</p>
<p>“You think Afghanistan broke my heart?”</p>
<p>“It would break anybody’s,” Nicky said.</p>
<p>He was incredulous. He wanted to laugh, so he did. “You really don’t get it, do you?”</p>
<p>“Get what?” Joe asked, frowning.</p>
<p>“This place didn’t break my heart, Joe, I couldn’t care less about it, if I’m being honest.” Defiantly, he looked from Joe to Nicky and back again, enjoying the dismay creeping over Joe’s features, flinching from the inscrutability of Nicky’s. “People shouldn’t survive in places like this, on land like this.”</p>
<p>“Booker,” Joe began, but he cut him off.</p>
<p>“Is it because we can’t die that the two of you care so much when it happens to other people? Because that’s stupid. People die all the time. They’re supposed to. There’s too many of them anyway—so why not these people, here, now, in this fucking waste of a Himalayan bywater? Afghanistan’s a hole in the bottom of the world. We should let them burn. They deserve it.”</p>
<p>He was flying again. Falling. The world tilted on its axis, and the ground came up to meet him. </p>
<p>In London, he’d watched Joe and Nicky together. The word that came to mind was <em>indivisible. </em>Their bodies, their spirits. It had been easier to bear back when he believed them perverse; knowing better made it harder. There was nothing perverse about the way Joe laid Nicky out on the bed and kissed down his body, Nicky’s legs over his shoulders, Nicky’s head flung back, the parabolic arch of his spine when Joe put his mouth on him. Nothing perverse about the way Nicky made a fist in Joe’s hair and dragged him up, the way their bodies began to curl into a rhythm against each other as they groaned and panted and pressed their faces together. Maybe there was something a little perverse about the way that Nicky pulled them apart, but they both laughed and then Nicky was straddling Joe and sliding back onto his cock, and their skin must have been hot, so hot. Joe’s fingers traced Nicky’s neck, he leant up to tongue at his nipples, and all the laughing tenderness that was part of who they were together—… it was too much to bear, it was unbearable. How could two people love so much, and still have more left over for the world?</p>
<p>Booker opened his eyes, and Joe and Nicky were peering down at him.</p>
<p>“Christ,” he said, and brought up an arm to shield his eyes from the brightness of Nicky’s gaze.</p>
<p>“You’ve been smoking some very potent stuff,” Joe commented, while Nicky reached out to feel his forehead with a cool, dry palm.</p>
<p>“Nangarhar Tarballs,” Booker said dully. He shoved Nicky’s hand away. “Afghanistan’s select, haut de grand cru… premiere deluxe… etcetera. You could just kill me, you know. Be faster than waiting for the come-down.”</p>
<p>“Pull it together, Book,” Nicky said sternly. “Be a little brave.”</p>
<p>“<em>Brave</em>?” He glowered at them. “For Christ’s sake, I’m not like the two of you and I’m not like Andy. I’m not brave and I never have been, and d’you know what? I’ve no wish to be! None. Never fucking have, either. So just…fuck it, okay? You’re not my keepers. Let me go.”</p>
<p>“No,” Nicky said, simply, and Booker wanted to throttle him.</p>
<p>“<em>No</em>?”</p>
<p>“No,” said Joe. “Accept it, brother, you’re stuck with us. And we’re going to get you out of here. I would advise you to make the best of it.” </p>
<p>And so Booker packed his bag under their watchful eyes. He said nothing when Nicky crushed the opium pipe under the heel of his boot and Joe flushed the remaining resin down the toilet. Then Joe and Nicky shouldered their guns, and Nicky wrapped his scarf around his face, Tuareg style, until only his eyes were visible, and they left.</p>
<p>It wasn’t long until sunset, and the streets of Kabul were nearly empty. They were stopped once, by a black-turbaned Talib wearing an eyepatch, but Joe held a conversation with him in Pashto and the tone was not unfriendly. “Joe is telling him that you are British, not American, and we are escorting you from the city,” Nicky translated in a low murmur. “The Talib says not to trust anything you say, because all Englishmen are liars and homosexuals.”</p>
<p>“Oh, terrific,” Booker sighed.</p>
<p>They were allowed to proceed, and their destination turned out to be a cemetery on the outskirts of Kabul. Joe said that a car would be coming to take them to the airfield after Maghrib.</p>
<p>“What?” Booker said.</p>
<p>“After sundown.”</p>
<p>The cemetery was an open place with mountains of rubble, tens of thousands of unmarked graves, and it was terribly cold. Booker pulled his coat tighter around him and began to pace, trying to stay warm.</p>
<p>“Watch out for landmines,” Joe said, indicating a large sign nearby.</p>
<p>Booker squinted at it: the writing was in Dari or Pashto, all squiggles to him. “Huh?”</p>
<p>“This is a minefield. The Taliban patrol the area.”</p>
<p>“I feel like I’ve landed on the moon,” Booker said, looking around. A few feet away there was a depression in the ground, a rectangle of cleared earth outlined in small white stones, and a candle beside it. When Booker squatted down to inspect more closely, he saw a glint of orange in the candlewick. “Somebody was just here,” he hissed, reaching for his gun.</p>
<p>“Praying at the shrine, probably.” Nicky stood a few yards off, his edges blurring into the darkness.</p>
<p>“Who?”</p>
<p>“I’ve no idea.”</p>
<p>“I mean, whose grave is it?”</p>
<p>“Cain’s, perhaps? Depending on whom you believe.”</p>
<p>“<em>Cain </em>Cain? <em>The </em>Cain?”</p>
<p>Nicky nodded. “Adam’s first son, yes.” </p>
<p>Booker felt the back of his neck prickle with unease. “Why here?”</p>
<p>“According to the Mughal Emperor Babur,” Joe said, in his Storytelling Voice, “Kabul was founded by none other than Cain himself, who is said to be buried in the gardens south of Bala-Hissar in this very cemetery, which is known as Shohada-e-Salehin, or the Place of Martyrs.”</p>
<p>“This shrine, though—” Booker shook his head. “Who the fuck would pray to <em>Cain</em>?”</p>
<p>“Perhaps they pray <em>for</em> him,” Nicky suggested.</p>
<p>“Why would they—”</p>
<p>“You remember the story in Genesis, yes?”</p>
<p>Booker shrugged. “Cain and Abel, sure.”</p>
<p>“After he killed his brother, Cain was marked,” Nicky said. He didn’t have a Storytelling Voice like Joe’s, but there was something rhythmic and soothing about the way he spoke French, as if he were caressing the words. “And so they drove him out, everywhere he tried to rest, they drove him away.”</p>
<p>“Uh-huh.” Booker stared down at the grave-shrine, repulsed and fascinated in spite of himself.  </p>
<p>Nicky adjusted the Kalashnikov against his shoulder. “As the legend goes, only Kabul did not turn him away. He was an extremely old man when he arrived, far older than Yusuf and me, many years older than a thousand years old. Anyone could look at him and see that it was past his time, that he could no longer hurt anyone.”</p>
<p>Booker shivered, and not just from the cold. Nicky’s tone was almost unbearably gentle, full of compassion and sorrow for the mythical figure who was said to be the originator of evil. The destroyer. The solitary, desperate, cursed figure of ultimate barrenness. The first human to usurp God’s power over life and death; the first human, arguably, to walk the earth as they did now, pinned to the ground, unable to die, no matter how desperately he might have wished to go.</p>
<p>Nicky continued: “Cain’s heart was worn out with regretting, after so many centuries of remorse. Perhaps he felt nothing at all by the time he arrived here, just an animal looking for a soft bed of leaves, some place out of the night wind.”</p>
<p>“And this has always been a hospitable city, welcoming of strangers, a good host to the weary traveler—or so it used to be,” Joe added.</p>
<p>“That was a mistake,” Booker said harshly. “They should’ve driven him away. Let him wander another thousand years. He brought them fucking… <em>millennia </em>of bad luck, coming back here. He should’ve found a cave, a hole in the ground to die in.”</p>
<p>“It’s rumored that he was murdered here,” Joe said.   </p>
<p>“What, really?”  </p>
<p>“Yeah. And if Cain died violently in Kabul…” Joe blew into his cupped hands to warm them. “I guess it’s not for us to say, who deserves to be punished, or for how long.”</p>
<p>“Why should it matter if Cain, of all people, was murdered?” Booker asked, curious, and Nicky picked up the thread of the story.</p>
<p>“Cain was marked not as a sign of the evil he had committed when he murdered his brother, but as a protection: God warned the human race to leave the murderer unharmed. He who killed Cain would be punished sevenfold. Thousandfold. If he was in fact murdered here…” Nicky shrugged slightly, and Booker wished he could see his face, but Nicky’s features were still obscured by his scarf. “Who can say what the genesis of evil is, or how far back one has to go to find it?”</p>
<p>The sky was black and wild with fierce stars. Booker was seized with the mad urge to get down on his knees before the shrine and pray for his own deliverance. Instead, he cleared his throat. “I did want to help, in the beginning,” he admitted in a low voice, unable to look at Joe or Nicky. “Not just sending along your messages. I thought I could do some good with the agency. Biscuits and bandages and woolly blankets, all that shit. But this place blew my mind, blew it to fucking bits, and, well…”</p>
<p>“Sebastien, we know,” Joe said.</p>
<p>A pair of headlights appeared in the distance, and Booker sighed with relief that his deliverance had come.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>***</p>
<p> </p>
<p>When the Twin Towers collapsed three years later, Booker was standing on a rainy beach on the Dingle Peninsula in Ireland, watching Joe and Nicky play with a couple local kids, splashing around in a tidal pool. They would have been good parents, he thought, shame they’d never have the chance. Then he noticed a crowd gathering around a nearby car radio; he joined it just as, in New York, the second tower was coming down. Minutes later, the beach was abandoned, everyone going home to wait for what felt like the end of the world.</p>
<p>Only the three of them stayed behind.</p>
<p>Joe wandered off by himself, down the beach, where he stood immersed to his ankles in the chilly water. Nicky sat on a rock, singing under his breath, <em>between the stars I’ll leave my love, as the world falls down, </em>which Booker recognized from that fucking mental David Bowie movie they’d watched a few nights ago. Maybe the three of them had smoked a little too much hash, because he couldn’t follow the plot at all. Goblins and faeries. He supposed the music was all right, though. He’d retreated to his bedroom and closed the door, spent the rest of the night listening to Joe and Nicky make love through the thin walls. <em>Oh, Nicolò, Nicolò. Yusuf my love, I’ll place the moon within your heart. Fuck me harder, Nico, leave your love between my stars. </em>That was Joe and Nicky: still fucking like newlyweds after nine hundred years.   </p>
<p>“Everything’s gonna change now, isn’t it?” he asked Nicky.</p>
<p>Joe and Nicky’s old commander, Ahmad Shah Massoud, the Tajik hero who was supposed to save Afghanistan and deliver it from the Taliban: he’d gotten himself blown up two days earlier. Suicide bomber. It was all connected. Booker wished he’d been paying better attention, back in Kabul, when the bin Laden crowd of foreigners started slipping into the country.</p>
<p>Nicky did not reply. His eyes were fixed on Joe, down at the shoreline.</p>
<p>“Will we go to New York?” Booker pressed.</p>
<p>“I don’t think so, no,” Nicky said, absently. “But Andy will decide.”</p>
<p>“You know we couldn’t have prevented this, right?”</p>
<p>Nicky closed his eyes.</p>
<p>Booker marched down to the water to retrieve Joe, who was probably near hypothermic, and towed him back up the beach to where Nicky sat. Nicky said something gentle in Arabic and helped Joe put his socks and shoes on again. Joe wrapped his arms around Nicky and clung to him fiercely.</p>
<p>So it went, when you loved the world.</p>
<p>Booker looked inward and tried to determine what he was feeling. A creeping numbness. A kind of death-hauntedness. In moments like this, he always wanted to ask Joe and Nicky what it felt like to love each other and love the world in that vast, oceanic way that they did. Were they afraid that it was all going to end, were they measuring out the time that was left or might be left and did they have a morbid fear of numbers and dates, and was it a painful place to be, out there, in life, the brightness and the light and the fear of losing each other, of dying first—who dies first?—and every time they held each other was that what they thought—who dies first?—and the cold cold feeling that came in the small hours and the stewing in the past and the sense of everything being maybe the last time, and was it worth it? Was it worth it?</p>
<p>But he didn’t ask. He never did. Instead he put his hand on Joe’s shoulder and squeezed. He met Nicky’s eyes and found them to be the color of ancient jade.</p>
<p>The world was still this faraway afternoon, the beach as hushed and hollow as an empty church, and they could be quiet now if they wanted to be.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Thank you very much for reading! I accessed a hefty pile of research in the process of writing this story, but of course it's barely a gloss on a single moment in a long, complicated history. I was interested in exploring Booker &amp; Joe &amp; Nicky's dynamic within this particular scenario, and while I may have certain opinions about the history of Western involvement in Afghanistan, I'm not a foreign policy expert, obviously! No sophisticated referendum intended here, just character study. </p>
<p>I can say, with much greater authority, that Booker, Joe and Nicky did in fact get high together while watching Labyrinth starring David Bowie. </p>
<p>Joe quotes from the great 17th-century Persian poet Saib Tabrizi's epic "Qandahār-nāma." </p>
<p>Thank you again. It is always such a pleasure to hear from you!</p></blockquote></div></div>
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